Dr Adam Kay said he left the NHS after a disaster in the maternity ward

I worked in obstetrics and gynaecology (babies and lady bits) on the front line of the NHS for seven years – one of the 1.4 million people working day in, day out – tirelessly and proudly, for what is surely the very jewel in the crown of this country.

It’s love for this amazing institution and what it stands for that means not a single member of staff works the hours they’re paid for – everyone works far above and beyond to keep it running.

I would routinely drive home three hours late, exhausted, blood-splattered, the window down and the radio blaring just to keep me awake on the journey – but always with a smile on my face.

The NHS is a national treasure, and it's miles better than the American healthcare system, Adam Kay argues

No, Donald Trump.

Universal healthcare is a wonderful thing and the NHS is, in the words of Aislinn Macklin-Doherty – a cancer doctor and NHS campaigner – “a shining example to the world of what can be achieved when we put the needs of the collective good over the interests of a few wealthy individuals”.

And for Trump, the leader of the world's only industrialised nation without universal healthcare, a country where nearly nine per cent of people have no coverage at all, to criticise the NHS feels a little rich.

I'm not saying that the NHS is without its flaws. I, for one, quit medicine in 2010 after a terrible experience working on the labour ward – we all hope to end up with healthy mum and a healthy baby every time, and that day I had neither. A complication with a caesarean section saw a baby die and its mother lose 12 litres of blood.

Even though any of my peers would have done exactly the same as I did and had exactly the same outcome, it shook me so terribly I couldn’t continue.

Adam can empathise with exhausted and overstretched doctors - he worked on the front lines of the NHS for seven years

Most doctors and nurses who leave the profession do so for different reasons – because they’re disillusioned and exhausted. Staff who have always gone the extra mile are at breaking point.

One of my colleagues, Dana, was an emergency medicine doctor but left last year because of unsafe staffing levels.

She said: “We were so overstretched, I’d get to the end of a shift feeling sheer relief nothing terrible had happened. There were so many close shaves because we were simply understaffed – you just can’t get to the patients you need to quickly enough.”

Another doctor, Alex, isn’t far behind her.

He tells me: “My job is a living nightmare. I’m leaving as soon as I can work out a way to pay the rent – hopefully before I have a nervous breakdown or one of my patients dies because I’ve failed them through lack of sleep or time.”

In fact, only half of junior doctors are continuing in the profession after their first two years on the wards.

The NHS was founded in 1948, following the devastation of the Second World War, on three founding principles – that it meets the needs of the population, that it’s free at the point of delivery, and that care is based on clinical need not ability to pay.

At the heart of it was the sentiment – impossible to argue with – that healthcare is a basic human right.

This principle is still what underpins the NHS, and it's something that we as a nation are justifiably proud of.

Yet while Trump was wrong to dismiss the NHS as 'broke', it's certainly creaking.

A slow starvation of funds means that patients are lying unattended on trolleys for hours, operations are getting cancelled and preventable deaths are tragically happening through under-staffing and lack of resources.

Many doctors agree that the money is being spent in the wrong places, with crippling expensive PFI deals - where private companies

take on the initial cost of building hospitals in return for annual payments and interest - and piecemeal privatisation of services leaching money out of the NHS.

Private companies made £831million out of NHS contracts in the past six years - money that could have paid for a fair few doctors, nurses, drugs and scanners.

Middle managers are growing in greater numbers than clinicians, and non-NHS firms won 70 per cent of tendered contracts last year.

And more than that, the simple truth is that the NHS just isn’t getting enough money.

Theresa May on defensive after Labour's Jeremy Corbyn slams Tories for NHS crisis at PMQs

So what’s the problem?

We’re spending less per head on healthcare than we ever have before, and it's showing.

What we need to do now is build the NHS up, not tear it down.

For if we do we might find that in just 10 years time, there could be a barren wasteland where the NHS once was and in its place, there will be some sort of American-style health system.

The US spends more per head on health than any other wealthy nation - but it hasn't resulted in better health.

The US system - a patchwork of employment-linked insurance policies and patchy state healthcare for the poor- has repeatedly been found to be one of the most expensive and least effective systems.

A recent study by a think tank found that the US system performed worse than 11 similar countries, all while spending more. The UK performed the best. The US also had the highest rate of preventable deaths of all 11 countries.

The poorest people in American society face unbelievable fees for treatment - with Truven Health Analytics estimating that the average cost of giving birth in America is around $30,000 (£21,000).

If you have insurance, they'll take care of the bill, but if you don't, you're facing down a monumental charge in return for the joy of welcoming new life into the world.

We should see the skyscraper-high bills of America as the ghost of Christmas future when it comes to NHS privatisation. Politicians may act dumb, but they’re not, and we’ll be lured very stealthily into this particular gingerbread house.

We’ll be promised it’s only little corners of the NHS that are changing, but there’ll be no trail of breadcrumbs to help us find our way back through the forest to the land of universal healthcare.